Wassce results: A nation fixated on national averages

By Peter Anti PARTEY, PhD.

Every year, when the West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) results are released, Ghana erupts into the same familiar debates: Did the national pass rate go up or down? Is Free Senior High Schools (SHS) working or failing?

Almost always, the conversation revolves around one number: ‘The National Average’. But our obsession with this single figure hides more than it reveals.

The truth is simple: national averages tell us nothing about what is really driving performance in our schools. Beneath the headlines sit hundreds of SHS performing at dramatically different levels.

Some continue to excel, recording four-credit pass rates of 60 to 90 percent. Others have been stuck below 20 percent for years.

If we continue fixating on national averages, we will never understand the real forces shaping our educational outcomes.

A recent look at school-level WASSCE performance between 2017 and 2023 (shown in a cluster of anonymised schools labelled AA to JJ) makes this painfully clear. While schools such as AA, BB, HH, II and JJ consistently push national averages upward, others like CC, DD, EE and FF rarely cross the 20 percent mark. Their chronic underperformance drags the national average down year after year.

Yet when the national results are announced, we never ask the most important question:
Which schools improved, which declined, and why?

It is the same mistake economists would make if they tried to analyse inflation without looking at the specific items driving prices up or down. To understand inflation, you do not examine the overall rate alone; you break it down. Is it food? Transport? Rent? Only then can you craft targeted solutions. Education is no different.

If we want to raise national WASSCE performance, we must abandon the lazy comfort of national averages and embrace the hard work of micro-level analysis.

Policy-makers must be able to point clearly to which schools are improving, which are deteriorating and what factors – teachers, facilities, leadership and student preparation – explain the differences. This is how real interventions are designed.

A school that has recorded eight percent pass rates for five straight years does not need the same support as a school steadily performing at 70 percent.

Yet our policies often treat them as though they face the same challenges. They do not. Until the Ministry of Education and the Ghana Education Service (GES) shift from broad national conversations to detailed school-level diagnostics, many struggling schools will continue to be invisible in the data and in the policy response.

Ghana does not have a national performance crisis; it has a distribution crisis. A relatively small group of persistently low-performing schools determines whether the national average rises or falls.

If even a fraction of these schools were supported to move from 10 percent pass rates to 35 or 40 percent, the national picture would change dramatically. WASSCE analysis must, therefore, evolve.

It must stop being an annual ritual of political point-scoring and become a serious exercise in identifying the real drivers of educational performance. A nation that measures properly can intervene properly. A nation that analyses deeply can improve meaningfully.

Until then, Ghana will continue to be fixated on national averages, while ignoring the granular realities that truly shape the future of its children.

WASSCE results 2025

This article comes at the back of this year’s poor WASSCE performance. The West African Examinations Council (WAEC) has confirmed a national education concern with the release of the provisional WASSCE 2025 results, revealing a worrying surge in the outright failure rate – Grade F9 – across all four core subjects compared to the 2024 results.

An analysis of the official data released shows that the percentage of candidates who failed Core Mathematics outright has nearly quadrupled, rising from 6.1 percent in 2024 to an alarming 26.77 percent in 2025.

Similarly, the failure rate for Social Studies has almost tripled in a single year, from 9.55 percent in 2024 to 27.5 percent in 2025.

As indicated Ghana recorded a marked decline, with Core Mathematics suffering the sharpest drop in performance. A1–C6 passes fell from 305,132 in 2024 to 209,068 in 2025—representing a decline of more than 96,000 passes.

With a pass rate of just 48.73 percent, more than half of the candidates failed to secure the grades required for tertiary education.

Furthermore, about 6,295 candidates have their results cancelled for bringing unauthorised materials into examination centres, while 1,066 candidates remain under investigation, 908 had results withheld for specific subjects and 158 had their results withheld for all subjects.

The massive increase in F9 grades signals a dramatic downturn in foundational knowledge among the total of 461,736 candidates who registered for the examination. The steepest increase was recorded in the core subjects that form the basis for tertiary education entry.

About author

Peter Anti PARTEY, PhD., is a lecturer at University of Cape Coast & Executive Director of IFEST Ghana.

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